Appetite for Destruction

The debut from Guns N' Roses was a watershed moment in '80s rock that chronicled every vice of Los Angeles led by the lye-voiced Axl Rose and a legendary, switchblade-sharp band.

The video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” Appetite for Destruction’s mission statement, mirrors the journey that an unsuspecting listener might take during their first spin through Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut. A fresh-faced, 25-year-old Axl Rose, so country that he’s got a long stalk of wheat between his teeth, gets off a bus and enters a landscape that screams “bad side of town”; neon lights flash darkly, a shady guy perched on the corner approaches him, black-stockinged legs catch Axl’s eye. Cut to a similarly dank club where, with the aid of Aqua Net, Axl and the rest of Guns N’ Roses are barreling through the track, while TVs flicker into A Clockwork Orange-style fantasia about the bad news lurking all around.

The electric opening notes, played with sputtering enthusiasm by lead guitarist Slash, only hint at the terror that’s coming; Axl’s under-his-breath “Oh my god” cranks up the tension; and then, aided by Steven Adler’s lightly swinging drums and backing vocals that recall a demon choir, the full horror is exposed—a world where every vice is for sale depending on your mood for indulgence and your tolerance for sin. The chugging breakdown, which culminates in Axl’s shrieked “You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby! You’re gonna diiiieeeeeaagghghhhhhghghghgh,” is “Tubular Bells” through a Marshall stack, a horror movie in miniature for anyone who thought the rock’n’roll lifestyle was all fun and games.

Amid the bumper crop of records from ’80s bands who graduated from Sunset Strip clubs to MTV’s newly minted “Headbangers Ball”—the self-titled debuts from glam brats Faster Pussycat and biker-bloozers L.A. Guns—Appetite stood out for how absolutely harsh it got, its chronicles of the wild life in Los Angeles plainly stated by the lye-voiced Axl while his bandmates bobbed and thrashed. The Los Angeles portrayed on Appetite inverts the ideal of Randy Newman’s ever-lovable metropolis, turning it into a place where the then-in-vogue term “drug war” meant fighting with the spectre of heroin (aka “Mr. Brownstone”), where trickle-down economics meant buying cheap hooch on the last scraps of credit, and where paranoid fantasies were always justified. Women were beautiful and you could even put the ones with less utility in their place every so often. It was the jungle, baby, and you were gonna die.

Appetite for Destruction didn’t only stand out because of its storm of bad vibes, although that sure helped. The band’s stew of influences—caustic punk, sinewy funk, Aerosmith, the Stones—helped make it a switchblade-sharp statement of intent. “In the last year, I’ve spent over $1,300 on cassettes, everything from Slayer to Wham! to listen to production, vocals, melodies, this and that,” Axl told the UK music magazine Sounds in 1987, and while Mike Clink’s economical production doesn’t have the gloss of Wham!’s Make It Big, studying influences beyond the glammed-up bills at the Troubadour played a large part in the band’s sound.

From the their grimy photo shoots that became Metal Edge pinups to their candid discussions of how they survived before hitting it big (“Strippers were our main source of income. They’d pay for booze, sometimes you could eat...” Slash told Rolling Stone), Guns N’ Roses were often portrayed as a clouded mass of debauchery with insatiable needs to simultaneously consume and destroy. “We are just being ourselves, but at the same time, these ’bad boy’ images tend to sell,” Axl told SPIN in 1988. Slash told Melody Maker something similar that same year: “We’re not mean, we’re not nasty, we’re decent people. We’re just out for a good time, like five teenagers on the loose.”

The Parents Music Resource Center panic that took hold in the mid-’80s helped fuel GNR’s reputation as “bad boys.” The band were open about their vices on record and in interviews, but their wide-ranging appeal, despite the cluck-clucking of reactionary critics, wasn’t merely the result of them wearing their indulgences on their sleeves. They had shrewd ears and wide-ranging influences, resulting in a sound that used bouncing-ball grooves with punk’s economy that vibrated with paranoia and antipathy yet could (very occasionally) settle into romantic bliss. Bassist Duff McKagan came from the Seattle punk scene, drumming for the legendary hyper-power-poppers Fastbacks; he and drummer Steven Adler would hone their rhythm-section camaraderie by listening to Cameo and Prince LPs. Slash, the London-born son of a costumer who designed for Bowie, decided to pick up the guitar when he heard Aerosmith’s 1975 opus Rocks, telling Guitar World that the album’s “drunken, chemically induced powerhouse sound just sold me and changed me forever.” Izzy Stradlin, the band’s chief songwriter who’d escaped Indiana with Axl, had a Charlie Watts air about him, being the coolest guy in the room while he laid down riffs from which Slash’s solos could take flight.

“Welcome to the Jungle,” the album’s opener, is followed by “It’s So Easy”—one of the greatest one-two punches in rock history. A snarling chronicle of the void at the center of any Dionysian orgy, it’s powered by Adler’s butterfly-bee drumming and riffs that sound like they’ve been turned into pistons. The lessons in funk taken by Adler and McKagan make the album’s most harrowing moments roll out of the speakers all throughout—the shimmying that underlies the rancid takedown of a cleaned-up bad girl on “My Michelle,” the musical portrayal of the “West Coast struttin’” by the blotto protagonist of “Nightrain.” Axl’s scorched-earth upper register is at key times doubled not just by his bandmates, but by a low-pitched version of his own voice—detailing that adds another edge to the group’s dystopian reveries.

Even with Appetite’s thick layers of grime, its path to mainstream success was shoved along by songs that reflected a bit of Southern California sunshine. “Sweet Child O’Mine” was the album’s big hit, a mushy love song set aloft by Slash’s thick arpeggiating (which, as he told Rolling Stone, was a “goofy personal exercise” overheard by Axl, who decided to write lyrics to it ) and Axl’s doe-eyed lyrics. It’s not all light-hearted—his initially muttered, eventually yelped, “Where do we go? Where do we go now?” that peppers the bridge reveals his ever-present search for more as the song resolves in a minor key.

The album’s most triumphant moment is the Jock-Jam-in-waiting “Paradise City,” a fever-dream anthem where green grass and lovely women abound, where everyone’s so cheerful that no one will give you shit if you add a synthesizer to the mix. The main riff is one of those so-simple-it’s-criminal melodies that get arenas shaking; when it double-times at the song’s end, with Slash freaking out on a solo and Axl pleading to be taken haaaawwoooooommmmeeee, it’s an invitation to exhume the toxins of the mean streets and the meaner drugs and the even meaner people and to just thrash away their residue.

Like most CD-era albums, Appetite has its lesser tracks, but even songs that feel like filler have odd filigrees that set them apart from their peers’ padding. “Anything Goes,” in which a horned-up Axl gets ready to get freaky, opens with Slash laying down an abstract psych-jazz solo and closes with a thrashing rework of the song’s central riff; “Think About You” is a fairly boilerplate love song elevated by beaded-curtain counterpoint guitars on its winsome chorus. “You’re Crazy,” which would later get a stripped-down treatment on the band’s stopgap 1988 LP G N’ R Lies, is a ball of paranoia made even more frantic by the guitars lagging ever so slightly behind its manic pace.

But “Rocket Queen,” the album’s closer, is a brilliant study in contrasts that still unnerves. It’s a mini-epic that hinted at the more sprawling aesthetic Axl and his bandmates would adopt on 1991’s Use Your Illusion diptych. (Those records contained the ruminative “November Rain” and the crystalline “Don’t Cry,” ones that the band had been workshopping since their earliest days as Hollywood Rose, and that were deemed inappropriate for Appetite.) It’s petulant, carnal, and romantic all at once. It famously incorporates a female orgasm recorded in their studio, with the woman’s cries and shudders folding into Slash’s guitar pyrotechnics, leaping into a yelp alongside the guitar. Its first half chugs and seethes while Axl goes over his bad side in detail—he’s seen it all, dined at elaborate buffets and came away still hungry, schooled himself in the art of manipulation. He is, in short, a bad dude…until he’s redeemed by the song’s second half, all windswept balladry that allows Axl to engage in a little street-corner whoa-oh-oh-ing. “All I ever wanted…was for you to know that I care,” he croons, an exclamation point proffered by the band in unison.

It’s a surprising closing sentiment for an album so drenched in fear and loathing. But taken of a piece with the band members’ declarations that despite the hard living they were just five guys out to have a good time, it also shows how Guns N’ Roses’ early outlook was as animated not just by its members’ heady stew of influences. Perhaps all that wanton consumption could lead to a place of contentment that offered more than the comfort offered by the Midwest, more than the neon-lit debauchery of clubs’ back rooms—a wandering through the jungle that would open up into paradise.